Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is truly the poetic masterwork of American literature. First self-published in 1855 at Whitman’s own expense, this sprawling, revolutionary verse collection is like no other book before or since. It springs from Whitman’s genius and his daring vision of capturing the totality of the American experience in a grounding-breaking, unrhymed free verse form.

From the very first printed edition with its influential preface and just twelve untitled poems like “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass announced itself as a literary lightning bolt upon the poetry world. Whitman’s stripped down language, his embracing celebrations of the human body and sexuality, his ecstatic catalogs of people and places across the still-young American landscape – it was entirely without precedent. The original 1855 book polarized readers perhaps more than any other poetry collection ever has.

Its greatest early champion was none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson, who penned Whitman a famous letter calling Leaves of Grass “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” Whitman was so emboldened by the praise from the venerable Emerson that he reprinted the letter in full, without permission, in the second expanded edition of 1856. It contained Emerson’s resonant line: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

However, many other contemporary critics condemned Leaves of Grass as a vulgar affront, railing at the work’s unabashed depictions of sexuality like the graphic “A Woman Waits for Me.” Small wonder that “A Woman Waits for Me” was actually censored and removed in the 1856 edition due to backlash over its erotic content.

Yet it is precisely this audacious candor, this unrepressed erotic energy pulsating through Leaves of Grass that makes the collection so startlingly modern and resonant even today. In our current era of ubiquitous pornography and explicit pop culture, it’s easy to forget what a revolutionary rupture Whitman’s open depictions of sex and the human body caused in 19th-century American literature.

Just consider a few lines of “A Woman Waits for Me”:

It’s astonishingly sensual writing that seems almost demure by modern standards, but was enough to scandalize the Victorian literati.

And the revolutionary spirit of Whitman’s sexuality opened the floodgates for his even more subversive, trailblazing depictions of homosexual desire in the clustering “Calamus” poems that were added after the first edition. With their vivid, tender evocations of “the love of comrades” and “the manly attachment of friend to friend,” they remain some of the earliest and most lyrical expressions of same-sex love in American letters.

Beyond its boldness on sexuality and the body, perhaps the most powerful aspect of Leaves of Grass is the profound cosmic vision and spiritual transcendence Whitman imbues within his words. He seeks nothing less than to capture and embody the totality of the American nation, culture, landscape, and spirit in one epic, all-encompassing work. As he declares in the soaring introduction, the “one’s-self I sing” is large enough to “affirm the “worth[iness]” of the human body, the equal dignity of men and women, and the “passion” and “power” of life in a democratic society..”

You can feel this boundless ambition from the immortal opening lines of “Song of Myself”:

It’s an astonishing statement of selfhood that paradoxically fuses the individual with the cosmic whole, the “I” with the “you.” From there, the poem unfurls into a dazzling transcendental catalog of humans from all occupations and walks of life, unified into one visionary poem of democracy.

And yet for all of Whitman’s grand, universe-encompassing scope, he is also a poet obsessed with the minute, ecstatic details of corporeal existence and the sensory world. He uses his innovative free verse cadences and anaphoric repetitions to explore the miracles of nature in painstaking, rapturous detail. Just look at how he evokes the sights and sounds of the coastline in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”:

While indelible lines like “mocking-bird’s throat” have become iconically Whitmanian, passages like these allow you to revel in the poet’s gift for acute observation, his ability to train his lens on the minute details of the natural world that most of us hurry past.

Of course, the jewel in the crown of Leaves of Grass is and always will be the groundbreaking free-verse form that Whitman pioneered. Evolving gradually over the book’s multiple editions up until the 1892 “deathbed” version, the collection ushered a new era of innovative and open-ended poetic styles. No longer confined to strict iambic meters or need for end rhymes, Whitman unleashed a tidal wave of language with his flowing, unpunctuated catalogues that swirled ecstatically on the page:

It’s a revolutionary poetics of nighttime mysticism and churning life-force, crafted by Whitman’s bold decision to abandon conventional poetic structures in favor of spontaneous, meditative free verse lines. He insisted on the radical “now” of experience, placing the reader inside that distinct present tense of perception rather than packaging it into some pre-ordained metrical containment. For Whitman, life itself was the greatest free verse poem unspooling moment by moment.

Leaves of Grass is vitalizing, rough, spiritual, and utterly groundbreaking precisely because Whitman was a poet outside the Academy who forged his own idiom and form to suit his vast unifying vision of the American nation and soul. He depicted the Republic and all its contradictions, beauty and darkness, in a unified embrace. From the solitary throes of a mockingbird’s cry to the joyous shouts of a young woman bathing, Leaves contains bounteous multitudes.

While the formal experimental advances of later poetic movements like Imagism and the Beats also owed a debt to Whitman’s open-endedness, perhaps his most lasting impact was to make American poetry more authentically, well, American. His poems are anthems of unvarnished speech and the democratic experience, celebrations of the nation’s body politic in its entirety. Not just the elites, the educated classes, but working people, women, the poor, African Americans, Native Americans – Whitman sought to give poetic voice to all the nation’s disparate citizens and unite them in his cosmic, immortal lines.

Some of the most moving passages from Leaves of Grass enshrine simple laborers and working stiffs into sacred eternal moments. Here, the heartbreaking conclusion of “Kosmos”:

It’s this sacred embrace of everyday citizens and struggles that has cemented Whitman’s status as the most quintessentially American of bards. As he wrote in his defiant preface: “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has received it.”

There is no doubt that America has received Whitman and Leaves of Grass into its very soul. The 150th anniversary in 2005 saw an outpouring of celebratory essays, events, and renewed attention on his singular achievement. Successive generations of poets from D.H. Lawrence to Allen Ginsberg found inspiration in the book’s ecstatic outpourings and forward-advancing dicta to embrace life in all its forms: “Dismiss whatever insults your own soul.”

We still have so much to learn from Leaves of Grass, this amazing compost of mysticism, sensualism, democracy, and audacious selfhood. As we wrestle with a chaotic, unequal, divisive world, Whitman’s message of all-embracing cosmic unity could not be more vital or relevant. His spirit and voice reach out across the centuries with transcendent insight and love:

Whitman was and remains a true bard of the American experiment, creating his genius inspired songs of the self and democracy as the Republic itself was still being formed. We’re endlessly lucky to have this brash, rhapsodic, wildly innovative masterpiece Leaves of Grass as a poetic lighthouse to navigate us through the darknesses ahead. Its eternal call will echo across future ages: “Listen! I will be honest with you, I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes.”